Central of Georgia Railway Company Shop Property

Built between 1850 and 1855, this Savannah railway shop complex served the Central of Georgia Railroad, then among the most important lines in the Southeast. William Morrill Wadley, the line's superintendent and later president, designed it. The original group joined a machine shop, blacksmith shop, engine house and brick lumber shed, with a 125-foot ornamental smokestack nearby that also held a cast-iron water tank. Local brick from the Hermitage Plantation was used, and a Savannah foundry cast the iron band at the stack's base. An 1855 northern trade journal ranked the station among the most complete and elegant in the country. A later amendment widened the boundaries to take in the Red Building, Gray Building, freight warehouses, carpentry and paint shops, cotton yard gates and two canal bridges. Listing recognizes the complex as a rare survivor of early railroad-era industrial design and as the work of a notable railroad figure.